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Dora Holzhandler Portrait

It is with great sadness that I heard of the death last week of gallery artist, Dora Holzhandler. I visited her tiny flat in London to take her portrait in 2010. Surrounded by her paintings and photographs of the Dalai Lama and the Queen, she kept me fuelled with stories of her youth and enough tea and cake to feed an army.

‘All of Dora Holzhandler’s paintings possess an ineffable tenderness, they make us recall our childhoods, our myths, our roots, and if we have severed from these things, they make us long for them in a palpable way.’ Edna O’Brien